Imagine, if you will, an alternate reality in which the only way you could realistically have access to a car in the United States was to get one through your employer. You take a new job, your employer offers you a choice of three or four different car options, you pick one, and the cost of the car is automatically deducted from your paycheck each month. If your family members needed cars of their own, your employer might also offer cars to them for an additional paycheck deduction. If for any reason you quit or lost your job, you’d have to turn in the car keys on your way out the door. An optional government program would allow you overpay for the privilege of retaining the car for up to ninety days after you lost your job. After that, you’d have to wait until you managed to find a new job before you’d have access to a car again.
If you were out of work for a long period of time, you could theoretically buy a car independently, but you’d have to pay about five times what the car was actually worth, and there would be arbitrary limitations on what you could use the car for, based on any car problems you might have had in the past. And if you ever decided to become self-employed, you’d more or less have to resolve yourself to never be able to have a car again, until your business reached a point where you were able to pay five times what a car is worth for the long-term. Which would translate to mean that for the vast majority of self-employed people, having a car would simply not be an option unless they happened to be married to someone who wasn’t self-employed. In some instances, couples were even getting married prematurely simply so they could both have access to a car through one of their employers.
Sounds utterly ridiculous, right? If the above scenario were for real, people would be rioting in the streets over the absurdity of it. Bbut go back and replace “car” with “health insurance” in the above scenario, and it becomes an exact description of the current state of health care in the United States. So where are the riots over the injustice of the health care system? We all know it’s broken, but because most people either have a 9-to-5 job or are married to someone who does, most people go to bed at night feeling thankful that their lives aren’t the ones who are being placed at unnecessary risk and are unwilling to stand up for the rights of the rest of us.
I’ve been my own boss since 2003. And while I reached a point a few years ago where I could fit independent health insurance into my budget, the criminally overpriced nature of indie health insurance left me concluding that it just wasn’t worth placing that kind of wasteful financial drain on the business. That, and the fact that the ridiculous riders they would place on my indie policy for pre-existing conditions would prevent it from being of any use to me anyway; if my back or stomach or any of the other things that are already wrong with me got worse, they wouldn’t be covered. So for me, independent health insurance would simply be writing a massive ransom check each month on the off chance that something new goes wrong with my health.
Some will argue that my refusal to waste money on overpriced and useless independent health care is a choice on my part and that I’m the one willfully putting my health at risk. I would argue that it’s the only choice I have. I don’t know where along the line the American Dream got warped into this idea that if you wanted to start your own business then part of the deal means putting your health, and possibly the health of your family, at unnecessary risk.
Go back and read the first two paragraphs again, first as written, and then a second time replacing “car” with health insurance. If something doesn’t strike you as being absurd, then I can’t help you. Actually, there is one difference between the two scenarios – no one ever got sick and died in this country because they’d been denied access to a car.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.